It’s comedy before career for Rowan Atkinson

Getting enough comedy from Rowan Atkinson is almost impossible. The English performer has a habit of making himself scarce in the world of laughs.

Take, for instance, his portrayal of secret agent Johnny English, first featured in the 2003 spy-movie parody of the same name. Eight years later, the acclaimed funnyman, also known as the inept Mr. Bean, is back with Johnny English Reborn, which opens across Canada on Friday.

That’s a long wait between Atkinson’s stammers and slip-ups as the spy who is way too confident for his own good. But he just can’t help himself.

“I do seem to care more about the comedy than my career,” said the 56-year-old in the middle of promoting his new movie in Los Angeles. “I always seem to find time to do other things.”
In the Oliver Parker-directed film, Atkinson’s Johnny English is initially seen doing penance at an isolated Tibetan martial-arts facility run by the British secret service. The object of the exercise is to isolate the agent after he messes up on a mission.

However, the nincompoop is returned to active duty when a former CIA operative (Richard Schiff) says he will talk only to English about an international assassins’ plot to murder the Chinese premier, which would send the globe into chaos.

Naturally, English finds himself in the middle of a double cross, as he tries to figure out the good guys from the bad on his farcical journey of foul-ups, misfires and mistaken identities.

Rounding out the cast is Gillian Anderson, once Scully on TV’s The X-Files, and now playing the head of M17, Pamela “Pegasus” Thornton. Dominic West, best known as Det. James McNulty on the U.S. crime show The Wire, is debonair agent Simon Ambrose.

Shooting in Hong Kong, Macau, and famous historical landmarks in London helped set the film’s thriller tone. Additional comedy bits were set up by the re-launch of the Daniel Craig Bond films, which had rebooted the franchise since the last Johnny English effort.

Especially notable is a chase-and-fight sequence with English that sends up Craig-as-Bond’s Casino Royale parkour trackdown. That’s accomplished in scenes showing Johnny English walking around objects and taking elevators, instead of flipping, jumping and climbing over barriers.

“Johnny English is, after all, the sort of fellow who enjoys making life easier for himself, and he does have to allow for the advancing of middle age,” said Atkinson.

It’s a phase he understands, predicting that he may take it even slower in the future, as he continues to insist that a new Mr. Bean project isn’t likely.

His lack of ambition, and his reluctance to embrace the limelight, might have something to do with the fact that he never intended to have a showbiz life in the first place.

A graduate of Oxford University with an electrical engineering degree, Atkinson continues to try living “a normal life,” mostly under the radar in the English countryside with his wife, a former BBC makeup artist. He also has two grown-up children, but won’t talk about them, either.

He does confess that his real passion is for his exotic collection of automobiles, including a maroon McLaren F1, which he crashed last August, suffering a minor shoulder injury in the process and making headlines, however briefly, across the U.K.

Still, he considers himself more of a country-gentleman recluse than a famous international movie star.

“Most of the time, I’d rather go on a drive or visit somebody in Europe, or just not get into it [acting] all,” said Atkinson of his anti-career attitude. “It’s not because I am lazy. It’s just so stressful worrying about it all the time.”